


writing wants flesh

by Keturagh



Series: False Fruit [7]
Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age - All Media Types, Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Anger, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Fluff, Lavellan/Solas Fluff (Dragon Age), Pining, Pining Solas (Dragon Age), Pre-Relationship, Reading Aloud, Skyhold (Dragon Age), Slow Burn, Solas Fluff Friday, Teacher-Student Relationship, kinda. they're both adults. no collegiate structure. he's a mentor., mentor/mentee relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-28
Updated: 2019-12-28
Packaged: 2021-02-25 06:00:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,344
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21971077
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Keturagh/pseuds/Keturagh
Summary: “Think of what you represent, lethallin. Think of your position.” He needn’t remind her - nothing but her position had been consuming her for weeks, and he saw how the edges of it had already started to eat away at the parts of her that she called herself. He had seen her disappearing. He’d fretted over what he had done to her, to her spirit, by giving her this burden.She sneered and looked away from him.
Relationships: Female Lavellan/Solas, Fen'Harel | Solas/Female Lavellan, Lavellan/Solas (Dragon Age), Solasmance - Relationship, solavellan - Relationship
Series: False Fruit [7]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1579504
Comments: 1
Kudos: 19





	writing wants flesh

**”Writing wants, must have, must know, / is flesh, blood, and bone, / proof we are not made to be alone.” (The Thing Written, Stanley Moss)**

\--

“How can they not expect my _animosity?”_ she spat, rolling away from him and clutching her arms around her like a feral creature priming for the pounce.

Solas tried to keep from looking as stunned as he felt. Her change in demeanor had been abrupt — he had spoken the suggestion gently, meaning only to help prepare her for the meeting with the Northern Orlesian countrymen the following morning.

He frowned, opened his mouth to speak, and then reconsidered. Instead, he got his legs under him and stood to go.

“Your anger is reasonable,” he admitted, if with just a hint of reprobation.

And it was his surrender that prevailed upon her.

“Only… No, only… they’d be fools to expect anything else, wouldn’t they?” Pangara’s tone turned, now strangely pleading - an unusual desperation in it. “Josie has said we’re hardly more than myth to them. She told me some of them even speak as though we’re some long-dead people - a people they obliterated on the plains of Halamshiral.”

He should leave her with her righteous anger and with her convictions.

But had he ever been a man with that discretion?

“Think of what you represent, lethallin. Think of your position.” He needn’t remind her - nothing but her position had been consuming her for weeks, and he saw how the edges of it had already started to eat away at the parts of her that she called herself. He had seen her disappearing. He’d fretted over what he had done to her, to her spirit, by giving her this burden.

She sneered and looked away from him. Taking up the poker, an iron rod topped with the roaring head of a griffon, some artifact of a long-gone age, she tended the fire with ferocious energy. The doors to the balcony were open. The fire complained; it sparked to be mussed and adjusted, the thick scent of pine burning off the bark. He paced to the desk and the bookshelves fat and dusty with their tomes, thinking of how _young_ she was.

He thought of himself, and of the fireplace in this chamber roaring under a blast of his magic — furious, grieving — in an age the dust of which had long been consumed by blood-hungry stars.

Skyhold had survived worse tempers, he thought, wryly, as she flung the iron against the side of the fireplace. It was an unusual performance of pique. The iron clanged and clattered to the stone floor.

He heard her release a slow, intentional breath.

“I’m sorry if that startled you,” she said. And then she groaned, crouching back on her heels.

He picked a volume from the top shelf. “Better to get it out of your system now, undoubtedly.” He smiled softly when she shook her head, and he flipped through the pages. This volume had been added at some point in his centuries of sleep. He did not recognize it. “I know you are skilled at withholding your emotions. I had only mentioned it as a matter of good counsel. That you feel comfortable showing your frustration…” He shrugged. “As long as the poker does not come flying over here to crack me open.”

She gave a pained laugh. “It was childish.” And then she looked at the book in his hand, and looked away.

He brought it back over to where she held her knees against her chest, rolling her weight back and forth from her toes to her heels. He sat in the chair behind her, perched on the edge of the goatskin seat, leaning forward and pressing his toes into the warm fur of the rug.

“Are you familiar with the work?” He asked.

She shook her head, shrugged.

“Ah. This appears to be poetry. Exalted Age, if my conversations with Varric lend me any expertise on the subject. The obsession with shape verse serves as some clue. Although, the form’s popularity continued into the Steel Age. Remarkable condition. See, here, this one is shaped as a tower.”

She shifted closer to him, eyes scanning the whole of the page before she nodded.

“And this,” he continued, turning the page, “I believe is meant to make the shape of a bonfire. This tome is quite curious.”

“They aren’t good pictures,” she noted, and by her tone he knew her nervousness at being confronted in this way.

“This work is by one that the regime at the time would have called maleficarum. In the Fade, I have watched the monstrous burning times: an empress wild with her rule, whose pining brought her brother to her bedroom. I’ve seen the spirits reenact the horrors of those smoke-fogged nights, when mage-mothers would sheath their mouths with cotton. That this work survived? And that it lives here? It is most remarkable.”

She smiled at him oddly. “I’ve told Dorian he can take all these to the rotunda if he wants.”

Their eyes met. He held the book and everything he’d denied her — tried to tell himself it was the Dalish, it was the Orlesians, it was the years of slavery under Tevinter that had taken this from her. And in the cities of Elvhenan, in those places of learning, had not reading been considered tedious when an easy lock of memories could be imbued within the flattened timber just as well?

But he had taken this from her. For all her learning, for all she carried fierce within her — she did not have this. Or, what she had of it was piecemeal and insufficient, and he had heard her crying — the sounds ugly and panicked — in private after the Commander had first asked for her reports. He had written them for her. It had been a silent agreement under the pretense, at first, of knowing how little time she had to bother with such trifles. He had slipped them beneath her door to pass on. He’d adopted a rougher hand to mimic her; he had hoped that the choice would not offend.

They’d never spoken of it.

And now there was so little pretense left between them.

A danger in itself.

The light of the fire was golden; the wintry night broken by this memory of summer, fluttering a heat into the chamber that was part fire, part her closeness at his knee.

“Why don’t you just read it to me,” she sighed, finally.

“If I might speak the words with you,” he said, carefully, “would you be opposed?”

Pangara put her hands over his hands and looked down at the book. A twist of sore rage he caught in her eyes and then… a thing he had not wanted to, had not meant to, elicit. Defeat.

“If this is what will make you stay tonight.” She lowered her lips to the insides of his wrists. She pressed a kiss to right and left - and his whole body plummeted into chills and shuddering yearning. As he quelled these palpitations, she eased herself up and onto his lap, taking the book from his loose grip and raising it to her gaze. She frowned at the first stanza. “Protect the flame…”

“Incendiary.”

“Incendiary, which remembers my fair Lad and Son. A…”

“A pyre. The spelling is archaic - ”

“Pyre of the souls. A pyre of the souls crown-reaching…”

The night ended with them both laid out on the pelt in front of the fireplace. She practiced the shapes of letters on his back and he guessed at each. Her touch flickered against him again, and again — and she spelled his name, and her name, and her clan’s name, and the names of everyone they knew and everywhere they’d been on his body. And sometimes he pretended to not know: “S-E-R…. The title of a noble knight, perhaps?” And she snorted and then spelled names he’d never heard before. And that was how she introduced him to her family, really — letters traced against his back, her loved ones pressing on his shoulders.


End file.
